Advertising awards are either the bane or the lifeblood of the industry, depending whom you ask. Expensive to enter and time-consuming to judge, they nonetheless boost a creative’s career and snag new-business for networks. And without them, agencies would have a lot of empty shelf space.
Yesterday, Amir Kassaei, CCO of DDB Worldwide, took the industry to task for focusing too much on awards, and said his network would be pulling back this year. DDB "will not play this mad game," he wrote. "We will be coming up with a plan to divest ourselves from the madness."